Author: thepassionatereader

Another of the seemingly endless WWII historical novels, this one deservedly won the 2015 Nobel prize for fiction. Like Kristen Hannah’s The Nightingale and Pierre Lamaitre’s Au Renoir La Haut, it is set mainly in occupied France, in this case, in the small Brittany port city of Saint-Malo, as well as Paris. Narrated by the author in the present tense throughout, it covers the entire war time period, with follow up of several surviving characters up to 2014; the author makes extensive use of the well-worn time shift literary device for the events of the war period, but the time frame and the numerous characters are not particularly hard to follow. The wartime history of the city seems accurate as far as I can tell, although the technical skills of the secret resistance radio developers and the elaborate scaled down model of the city that the blind girl uses to navigate may be exaggerated.

The poignancy of the losses in war, the cruelty as well as heroism of warriors on all sides of the conflict (a Nazi soldier with increasing unease about their goals risks his life to sabotage their plans) and the stamina, determination, and bravery of civilians and soldiers alike are all vividly displayed. But this is not what makes this story uniquely beautiful. The rich scenery and the graphic characterizations are intertwined with observations of universal truths, not just about Homo sapiens, but about all life and all of nature, and the transience and frailty of our life on earth and of our relationships. The blind teen, Marie-Laure Leblanc, with overly developed senses of touch, taste, smell and hearing to compensate for her lack of vision, almost seems to shout in defiance to the reader “Don’t give up”.

Two quotes may give you some sense of the beauty of the observations.

“At Madam’s suggestion, they lie down in the weeds and Marie-Laure listens to the honeybees mine the flowers and tries to imagine their journeys as Etienne described them; each worker following a rivulet of odor, looking for the ultraviolet patterns in the flowers, filling baskets in her hind legs with pollen grains, then navigating, drunk and heavy, all the way home.”

And a great analogy to the world of war propaganda:

“Do you know what happens, Etienne, … when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?…It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put a frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? …. The frog cooks”.

Thanks, Andra.

This true spy story from a former FBI operative provides an insider’s account of how espionage agents actually work. Tapped in 2000 to trap a suspected senior member of the FBI who was selling confidential information to the KGB over many years, he was chosen to work with the suspect and collect the crucial evidence because he was junior in the spy world and would never be suspected as a mole, by the culprit. The archaic methods of the FBI at that time with respect to internal security are almost laughable if the consequences had not been so dangerous. The actual culprit’s motives for selling top secret documents to the Russians are still unclear. In every respect he seemed outwardly to be a patriotic American, and was a devout Catholic member of the Opus Dei branch and a crusty humourless fanatic who tried to convert the author to his radical brand of Catholicism, and was hoping to coerce him into also working covertly for the KGB. He is now behind bars for the rest of his life-and collecting an FBI pension!

There were several times when the plan to trap the suspect came dangerously close to becoming completely unravelled. Although the risks of undercover work may be embellished a bit, the devious methods and secrecy of all parties are fun to read about. But it takes a terrible toll on relationships and families when they are constantly lied to, and kept in the dark about the actual work. Spies, and to a lesser extent, cops, are trained to trust no one, suspect everyone, and, if necessary, blatantly lie about what they actually do on the job. It probably takes a certain personality bordering on paranoia to do well in this field, and an outlook that sees everyone as flawed, secretive, suspect, and dishonest. I may be overly trusting of relatives, friends and strangers alike, and I could never adopt the world view of a spy. A recent social sciences controlled trial reviewed in The Economist concluded that, around the world, more people are honest than population surveys thinks are.

The writing style is a bit prosaic, and there may be some minor elements of hyperbole and self-congratulatory smugness, but the author seems like the kind of fellow that would make a great neighbour to share a beer with in the back yard. The last few pages outlining the shift of counterintelligence and spying to the cyberworld are instructive but not really part of the main story.

An engaging true story about how spies actually work, better than most James Bond-type spy fiction.

This British economist, writer, and broadcaster here discusses 50 inventions that have had a major impact on the modern economy. These range from the obvious, such as the plow, the

the shipping container, paper, the pill and the light bulb, to the obscure such as the the Billy bookcase and the plumbing S-bend. The choice of what to include is necessarily arbitrary; the romp through the history of their invention is entertaining and very educational, a broad brush stroke of the history of invention, but somewhat constricted to those of major economic importance, or at least of importance to economists.

This is the kind of book that can be read in airport lounges, or when you have short gaps in your leisure time. one short chapter at a time, without losing track of the whole. And if an invention does not interest you, skipping a chapter will not detract from the value of the book.

Not all of the inventions have had a positive impact, witness leaded gasoline and antibiotics in farming, which are discussed with careful balance. The discussion of the contributions of governments in the encouragement or suppression of innovation is likewise balanced and enlightening.

The elimination of lead as a gasoline additive coincided chronologically and geographically in the U.S. with with a decrease in crime rates. But this is correlation (albeit with a plausible physiological cause-and-effect explanation) not a proof of cause and effect. An alternative explanation for that correlation is postulated by another rogue economist, Stephen Levitt in Freakonomics- that the decrease in crime rates was due to the decrease in the population of unwanted children resulting from the Roe vs Wade 1973 ruling. Who is right, or are they both?

Humour is sprinkled throughout and Harford shows a keen appreciation of irony, for instance relating that Thomas Midgley, the inventor of leaded gasoline was treated for lead poisoning before advocating for addition of tetraethyl lead to gasoline, and was later strangled to death by one of his own serial inventions. Names of famous inventors are interspersed with names of people I had ever heard of who made equal unrecognized contributions.

The list does not include some things that seem obvious candidates for the list to this non-economist. Why are the inventions of the Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Alexander Fleming, Marie Curie, and Marconi not included? While Otis’s elevator makes the cut, the construction crane that facilitates the building of skyscrapers needing elevators does not. And while the agricultural use of antibiotics is included, the invention of the microscope that allowed for the discovery of all manner of microorganisms is not. The S-bend in plumbing prevented the stench of raw sewage from backing up into London homes via the new-fangled indoor toilets, but surely the sewage treatment processes that convert the raw sewage into potable water was equally important but is never mentioned. The internal combustion engine and the assembly line also failed to make the cut. Perhaps he is saving them for his next book?

I generally avoid books that promise a list in their title as they tend to be preachy self-help pap, but this is a highly educational, light, easily digested read that I highly recommend. Thanks, Tony.

My knowledge of English literature is remarkable for a gaping hole where classic novels should be, most of which I know of only by virtue of frequent references to them in subsequent works. In school we were exposed to a smattering of Homer (in Latin class), Chaucer, Shakespeare, a few dead white male poets, Shaw, T.S. Elliot, and Victor Hugo. At home we memorized scriptures, read Thornton W. Burgess nature stories, Twain, Zane Gray, and C.S. Lewis, but Darwin and enlightenment philosophers were verboten and I can not recall studying anything written by a woman, nor anything in translation from a foreign language. Ironically, after getting an Ontario Scholarship based largely on my high school English marks, I failed English 20 as a freshman at Western, concentrating on sciences. During my working career, I managed to devour many of the novels of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, and some Graeme Green and James Agee, in addition to the medical literature I needed to maintain my competence. Post-retirement, I tried to expand my reading choices but got trapped by curiosity into reading mostly philosophy, neuroscience, history, and biographies. As a result I am still very uneducated in English classics – no Plato, Greek mythology, Dickens, Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Stevenson, Woolf, Doyle, Proust, Swift, or Faulkner. I can never fill in this gap now, but occasionally I try, as with what follows. And partly because I have two part-Indian grandchildren, I chose to start with….

A Passage To India. E.M. Forster. 1924, 306 pages (not including editor notes, Appendices and a long introduction).

There are several slightly different editions to this classic. The one I read is, I think, the Everyman Edition, edited by Oliver Stallybrass published in 1957. The title is apparently taken from a Walt Whitman poem that I have not read. Set in the early twenties in a fictional town in central India during the Raj, the domineering bigoted smugness of the British rulers and the deep undercurrents of rebellion in the oppressed, generally poor natives divided by caste, culture and religion are lucidly dramatized. The conflicting cultural outlooks are exposed most notably by the differing interpretations of an apparent sexual assault by a native on an English woman in a dark cave outside the divided town.

The cast of characters is diverse and it is easy to get lost in the complex plot, the foreign-sounding names, and the symbolism of the different religious rites, but I really enjoyed this story. In order to fully appreciate the complexity, it probably should be read twice and studied, not just read. Or as a last resort, I could watch the Hollywood adaptation, probably a shortcut to banality.

If this classic had been studied in our Grade 12 English Lit class, I could guess at Don Birtwhistle’s homework assignment questions:

1) Did Forster achieve a balance in showing respect and understanding for both the British and the native Indian cultures? Justify your answer.

2) Discuss the possible explanations for the incident in the cave. Which is the most likely? Provide reasons for your choice in 200 words or less.

3) Compare and contrast the moral outlook of Dr. Aziz and Mr. Fielding.

I could now ace this assignment by finding answers on the internet, but it would have been tough in 1962.

The India that is on display no longer exists and the demise of the Raj is presciently predicted toward the end of the story. And there is certainly no residual of this India in my grandchildren. But it is a timeless great history lesson and a good read.

This easily wins the prize for the most bizarre novel I have ever read, or even heard of. It is fortunately not nearly as long as the number of pages would suggest as some pages have only a heading and one line of few words. Other sections consist of more than a full-page run-on single, bold-typed sentence heading followed by a few lines of nonsensical text. The author is a professor of English in the creative writing program at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; in retrospect that should have been a clue that I would not enjoy his writing. It is my impression, based on nothing but a hunch, that teachers of creative writing desperately try to outdo each other in weirdness and idiosyncrasy in their esoteric writing, forming a body of eclectic literature that us lesser mortals can never appreciate.

It is not just the format that is weird. It seems that a plot is optional and what little there is makes no sense, with many frayed loose ends; the characters are equally confusing. It is not clear whether it is the author or the narrating character that is in the manic phase of a bipolar disorder, unable to finish sentences, concentrate, or follow a line of thought, with a bad example of pressured speech. Or perhaps a paranoid schizophrenic high on magic mushrooms or LSD. Non-sequesters and garbled sentences abound. “I squirmed in a dream in which I encountered the space at the center of me that was not me. The space was made up of a form of matter that was so unstable that it was impossible to make a study of it just by being near it once. I touched its surface; my hand stuck. Space, I said, not moving my mouth, how are you in me but not me. Every window in the city broke….. I tore an alley down into itself. My hand broke off at the wrist.”

I should have given up at this point, but the lavish if somewhat muted praise by seven fellow authors on the jacket kept me going, hoping there was some hidden deep existential insight or at least something more than nonsense in this narrative. If there is, I missed it completely. On reflection, I realized that I had never heard of any of the authors praising this book, nor of their books. But a cursory online search reveals that at least five of the seven are teachers of creative writing. I rest my case.

This intrepid, restless, young Canadian here writes an engaging and enlightening travelogue of her risky and demanding year-long travel, mostly by bicycle, through China and Tibet, and then from Turkey through Central Asia to India and Tibet trying to retrace the Silk Road. Like the late Christopher Hitchens, she seems happiest when alone in dangerous situations, far away from anything that could be called civilization. Along the way she reflects on the meaning of borders she prefers to ignore, whether political, geographic, physical or mental, with stunning analogies, metaphors, and similes. But she never judges any political borders harshly. Her political allegiances remain a enigma.

The risks of hypothermia, heat stroke, starvation, altitude sickness, falls off an icy mountain pass, endemic diseases, or incarceration by hostile natives provide the adrenaline rushes she seems to need to feel alive. Is there some unique genetic brain wiring that makes some people head off on dangerous hikes to the earth’s poles, peaks or bleak uninhabitable deserts? But she is no antisocial loner. Although her home, where I suspect she spends little time, is apparently in remote British Columbia forest off the grid, she developed strong bonds with fellow Rhodes scholars at Oxford, her teachers at M.I.T., with her intermittent fellow adventurers, and with natives along the route. But she declined a desirable cushy lucrative career as a biology lab researcher, preferring to study nature in the raw, cruel outdoors. And far from being an uneducated wanderer, she discusses the lives and writings of Darwin, Marco Polo, various philosophers, Indian mystics, the Dali Llama, Homer, Goethe, John Muir, Thoreau, and Carl Sagan in the context of her travel experiences.

There is a very helpful map of the route provided at the front: it needs to be consulted frequently by those of us who are geographically challenged, but I was often still unable to pinpoint the progress of the travellers. Perhaps that is the point- she thills in getting lost and probably intends to let her readers do so also.

There must be a great temptation to adapt this journey into a Hollywood movie or a T.V. serial, and the scenery could be stunning, but I doubt that the beauty of the writing could ever be conveyed in another medium.

So many good quotes. “We need this world and this world doesn’t need us. Why do we persist in behaving as if the converse was true?” “The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear that you will be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t.” And to succinctly capture her outlook on life. “We are here only by fluke and only for a little while. So why not run with life as far and as wide as you can?”.

Thanks, Michelle.

Last Girl Lied To L.E. Flynn, 2019, 344 Pages.

I picked out this new modern day thriller only because of a couple rave reviews on the jacket and because the author lives in London, Ontario, although I had never heard of her in the fifty one years I lived there. I had difficulty relating to the characters, given that they are almost all teenage students in a California coastal town in 2018. Perhaps my imagination just won’t stretch that far.

The introspection, peer pressures, lies, conflicts, longings and lusts, wild drunken parties, casual hookups (a term that did not exist in this context when I was a teen- it meant hooking up an implement to a tractor), jealousies, extreme emotional lability and mental anguish of the characters are totally foreign to me, even as I think back to my experiences as a free-range rural teen. Without texting, email, Google, or even television or booze in the house, the only parties were on the party line phone where one call would bring six or eight men for a day of hard work harvesting oats, wheat or corn. If there were girls trying desperately to get me to hookup, or even date them, I was too naive or too busy studying to notice. We had our eccentricities, but mental illness was never labelled as such and I was only ever aware of two suicides in my community; in this story two classmates appear to commit suicide by drowning, exactly one year apart. And if my urban children in their teens in the 90s with booze, parties, and television readily available experienced the degree of emotional distress of the characters in this book, I was oblivious to it or in denial.

The book is chopped up into 92 very short chapters, not all arranged chronologically. Universally, the characters appear to be white, urban, and from the middle class, not the demographics of present-day coastal California.

In spite of my reservations about the exaggerated characters, the surprise ending is totally unpredictable, unique, and inspired.

I suspect that most present day teens and even their parents will relate to, and enjoy this book more than I did. And I hope that my grandchildren never experience the extreme teen angst depicted here. But I may remember something from this book when they reach their late teens.

Indivisible By Two. Nancy L. Segal. 2005 253 pages.

As the grandfather of fraternal twins, with a lifelong interest in the nature/nurture debate, I read this somewhat outdated book hoping for some insights. This is the second book about twins by this twin Director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, formerly at the Twin Studies Center at the University of Minnesota. The twelve stories are all interesting in themselves, but are almost all about identical twins, triplets or one set of four, i.e. two sets of identical twin boys from one pregnancy. They do little to add to the extant twin studies that attempt to determine the relative contributions of genetics and environment to physical and mental characteristics. Most twin studies addressing this compare the frequency of specific traits in identical (monozygotic) twins compared to fraternal (dizygotic) twins. In addition, the environmental influences can be suggested by comparing identical twins reared together vs those reared apart, not only with respect to normal behaviour, but also to specific disease susceptibilities.

Several of these stories feature cases of mistaken identity that would make Shakespeare envious. And some highlight the uncertainties and mistakes of adoption systems and bizarre legalities around the world. An identical twin man had to legally adopt his genetic son because that son was carried to term after artificial insemination of his wife’s identical sister as the surrogate mother. With several adoptees in my extended family, the adoption stories were of interest to me. A story of an adoption agencies’ errors in Ottawa gave the book some local colour for me.

There are specific interesting observations that are difficult to explain on a purely genetic or purely environmental basis. Why is only one of three identical triplet men a homosexual, while the other two both have multiple sclerosis, albeit at different stages? (The gay one may also have this affliction, with early symptoms.) Even more confusing is the pair of identical twins, only one of whom is a transsexual. And when identical twins marry identical twins and then have identical twins, the labels can get problematic. Your uncle is then genetically your father, a your mother is genetically your aunt, and your brother is genetically indistinguishable from your father and your uncle.

This book does not even mention the word ‘epigenetics’, a term that came into use in the last 15 years. This refers to the variable influence of environmental exposures to the expression of specific genes; in the past the variability of the result of a gene’s action in different individuals was called ‘variable penetrance’ covering up the true meaning: “We don’t know why this happens”. Epigenetics studies have the potential to explain away much of the discrepancies in the nature/nurture debate, and shed a lot of light on past twin studies.

One does not need a science background to enjoy these twelve stories of human development. In fact, I am not sure it even helps. They are great human interest stories on their own.

It can be enlightening, even if disconcerting to, at least occasionally, step outside your comfort zone and try something that is not part of your usual reading diet. Such is the case of this latest novel from Miriam Toews, a Canadian former Mennonite, and a talented storyteller, for me. The plot is adapted from the true story of women in an inbred Bolivian Mennonite colony of less than 2000, who, in a hayloft, over two days, plot to escape from the culture of male dominance, cruelty, and organized sexual assaults by gangs of men using belladonna to sedate their victims.

The illiterate women’s discussions include deep philosophical musings about their faith, doubts, obligations and dilemmas, abounding in allegory, symbolism and metaphors, and even the meaning of dreams. Open to many different interpretations, there are many pearls of wisdom and insight. The hypocrisy of the Mennonite culture, with secret drunkenness on mistletoe vodka, smoking, and crude language, is on full display. Dedicated feminists will rave about this story.

For a Mennonite writer, there are some glaring errors about the basics of farming. Straw is equated with hay, and kids play with manure in a hayloft, not where manure is likely to be found. Where was the fact checker?

Until about page fifty, I was thoroughly confused about this story, but it grew on me and I quite enjoyed the symbolism of an enigmatic journey, out of something and into the unknown. I can understand why this book has been praised as a classic and is in contention for various literary prizes. But I will not be reading Toews’s other offerings. Nor The Art Of The Deal.

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This autobiography by the former First Lady is unlike most political autobiographies; in fact it is in many ways not about politics at all. To be sure, she lauds her husband’s accomplishments, avoids discussing any of his failures, and derides his political opponents. But she didn’t ask for a life in the limelight, and felt as though life in the White House was constricting and that it limited her ambitions. The latter were and are certainly idealistic and perhaps unrealistic at times, but no one, regardless of their political viewpoint, can fault her motivations.

The book is divided into three main parts, plus a Preface and an Epilogue. Becoming Me, outlines her youth growing up as a poor black disadvantaged girl in increasingly racially segregated south Chicago neighbourhood blighted by white flight, and against all odds then attending Princeton and Harvard Law School. She became a corporate lawyer in a large Chicago firm but felt unfulfilled serving rich clients and corporations and quit to devote her talents to helping the disadvantaged advance and find meaning in their lives.

Becoming Us details the early years of her relationship with the future president, also an idealistic, cerebral, unlikely Harvard Law graduate, first as a co-worker in community organizations, then as a city hall advocate for changes to improve the lot of the poor in a variety of ways. Their love and devotion to each other seems obvious, even though they frequently disagreed about many issues, not the least of which was whether or not to even bother getting married. When Barrack first ran for public office, she initially only reluctantly campaigned on his behalf, and felt ambiguous about the sacrifices she had to make to do so, over and over again expressing her self-doubt with “Am I good enough?” questions.

Becoming More relates to her years as First Lady determined to support her husband while trying to maintain some semblance of normality for their daughters, and remain true to her principles. She was effective in engaging the public and food corporations to make changes aimed at reducing childhood obesity (in spite of Dr. Robert Lustig’s skepticism, expressed in his book Fat Chance) largely through the private sector rather than through legislation. She dug up part of the South Lawn to establish a vegetable garden, with the help of local D.C. school children, donating the produce to charities, and for consumption by guests. She advocated strongly for the wounded military and their families and, like Malala Yousafzai, for improving the access to education for girls worldwide. She chaffed at the niceties of protocol and the restrictions on her independence imposed by the Secret Service. She was appalled at Donald Trump”s election and refused to smile at his inauguration.

The writing flows naturally and beautifully, expressing her strong opinions, moral clarity, and sense of purpose, with precision. There are so many good quotes that I had difficulty deciding which to use here. I will use only two.

#1, from the Preface: “Now, I think it was is one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child-what do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that is the end.”

#2, from a point at which her innocent remark on the campaign was distorted and derided by the Republicans and the media, including the ever-sarcastic late Christopher Hutchins: “I was female, black and strong, which to certain people maintaining a certain mind set translated only to ‘angry.’ It was another damaging cliche, one that has been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room, an unconscious signal to not listen to what we have to say.”

Today, more than ever, we need to hear from strong, bright idealists like her, regardless of gender, skin colour, ethnicity, religion or nationality, or even age. Bring them on.

If there is anyone who thinks that the United States of America is a democracy that promotes and protects individual rights, freedoms, and the rule of law, at home and abroad, this difficult book will thoroughly shatter their delusions. Although Slahi wrote this memoir in 2005, it covers a period in his life well before that and remained unavailable as a classified secret document until his pro bono ACLU lawyers succeeded in getting an extensively redacted version made available with a Freedom of Information suit in 2012. And the Mauritanian devout Muslim writer remained in custody in Guantanamo until 2016, after the book was published. During much of his 14 year incarceration and torture, he was never given a chance for a legal defence, and he has never been charged with any criminal offence. Nevertheless he was considered to be the most valuable inmate in Guantanamo by the U.S. military brass, with accusatory media stories on CNN about his involvement in the Millennium Plot hatched in Canada to blow up LAX, and a recruiter and planner for the 9/11 attacks.

A lot of background information, ably supplied by Larry Seims in an introduction, notes and footnotes is necessary to understand this diary. In 2010, a U.S. judge ruled in Slahi’s favour in his habeas corpus application, but the generals simply and illegally ignored this ruling, retaining him for a further six years. Rather than decry the military thumbing their noses at the rule of law, the U. S. media castigated the judge’s ruling, having found him guilty in the court of public opinion, most notably in The New York Post. And CNN falsely stated as fact that he ran a website that was used to mastermind the 9/11 attacks.

Slahi is a Mauritanian native who travelled extensively for work, as a qualified electrical engineer. During the Afghani war to overthrow the communist insurgent government there, he joined Al Qaeda mujahideen fighters against the Soviets, his only real connection with a terrorist organization, one that then had the backing of the U.S. He spent 12 years working in Germany, and was interrogated extensively in Senegal and Mauritania in early 2000, at the insistence of the CIA, apparently for no reason other than having attended mosques in Montreal and Mauritania where radical Islamists were also seen. When he voluntarily showed up for further interrogation by Mauritanian police in November of that year, he was detained and turned over to the CIA, flown to a secret prison in Jordan for eight months of torture, then on to Bagram AirForce base in Iraq, and eventually to Guantanamo. The treatment he details along the way could not be dreamed up by any but the most sadistic inhuman people imaginable, but was approved by the Pentagon and Donald Rumsfeld. He was hidden from the visitors of the International Committee of the Red Cross to Camp Echo in Guantanamo lest the outside world see his extreme malnutrition and many bruises from beatings.

Besides being illegal and inhumane, the torture was remarkably ineffective. There was constant infighting between the military, the CIA and the FBI. The FBI shared computer files on him with the Jordanians, but not with U.S. military intelligence nor the CIA. The redactions in the published book are inconsistent and silly, with, for example, the gender of the interrogators being blacked out only if they were obviously female.

The confessions eventually extracted from Slahi included clear falsehoods. In Jordan, to avoid being sent to Guantanamo, he thought of lying about a plot to kill Mauritania’s dictator president, hoping to be sent back to Mauritania rather than being handed over to the U.S. military. After starting to hallucinate from the tortures in Guantanamo including weeks of sleep deprivation, and with prompting, he agreed with the interrogators that he had plotted to blow up the CN Tower. The interrogators were thrilled that they had finally broken him to confess to a crime, but as Slahi relates “you cannot just admit to something you haven’t done; you have to deliver the details, which you can’t when you haven’t done anything.” He later admits that he had never heard of the CN tower.

Canada does not escape criticism with respect to human rights violations in this memoir, although its role is minor; but just as with Omar Khadr, Canadian prosecutors were involved in Slahi’s case, interrogated him in Guantanamo, and probably in Jordan without revealing their identity and were complicit, if not directly involved in his torture.

I am not suggesting that preventing terrorist attacks is easy, or that some degree of subterfuge, deception, and coercion is not necessary in the interrogation of suspects. But when the people charged with protecting our freedoms become the terrorists, kidnapping and torturing their opponents on presumptions of guilt, we all lose.

My favourite quote: “ The (U.S.) government is very smart; it evokes terror in the hearts of people to convince them to give up their freedom and privacy.”

This is neither an easy nor a fun read, but is sobering, even frightening, and a reminder to all of how fragile and in need of support democracy really is. And it was written before Donald Trump’s cynical attacks on the remaining fragments of democracy. A valuable resource book for any course in Political Science, if that term is not an oxymoron.

P.S. The injustices that this man has suffered continue. Recently, he has been denied a exit visa from Mauritania to obtain medical treatment abroad- for the injuries he suffered during his 14 years of torture.

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Urban demographics vary widely over space and time, and for widely varied and often counterintuitive surprising reasons. With that less-than-profound statement I have summarized much of this Berkley economist’s thesis. Ergo, there is little reason for anyone else to waste their time reading this boring, outdated, humourless, and dry book.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. The author is obviously knowledgeable, sincere, and concerned about the future of America Inc. He makes a valiant but somewhat unconvincing attempt to explain the clustering of high tech companies and headquarters in very limited settings, and to predict the future of many cities and what their demographics will look like, based on a lot of data that often conflates correlation with cause. And, like almost all economists, his unstated assumption seems to be that the holy grail of all human existence is continuous growth in the GDP. In many places, this book reads like a Chamber of Commerce pitch for Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose, close to where the author happens live and work.

He gives no consideration in his wild predictions to effects of climate change, as Manhattan becomes a Venice and eastern parts of Boston join the Atlantic Ocean due to rising sea levels, or to the less likely Black Swan effect when the San Andreas Fault tosses Silicon Valley into San Francisco Bay, my predictions that are themselves uncertain. As Yogi Berra is said to have noted, paraphrasing a Danish proverb “It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future”. A recent review in The Atlantic definitively concludes that, in many fields, the predications of narrowly focused experts even with specialized information, are less accurate than those of well-read generalists, witness the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The overuse of buzzwords and the hyperbole used to describe the trends and studies he attempts to explain -“profound”,“surprising”,“staggering”,”remarkable”, “ striking”, “stunning”, “breathtaking”, “incredible”,“astonishing” “fascinating”, and “dramatic”- becomes annoying and most of those trends require no doctorate in economics to detect and analyze rationally. Any clear thinker could deduce that when an unskilled, unemployed worker moves from Detroit to seek work in a low-unemployment city, the prospects for work for those in the smaller pool of the Detroit unemployed improve. And one does not need a doctorate in any field to realize that physicians in large cities tend to be more specialized than those in small centres, the Mayo Clinic notwithstanding.

This book was given to me by a Ph.D economist with expectations that I would read it and write a review of it, so I slogged through it. Now you don’t need to.

This Norwegian scholar has here argued vigorously for a view of all religions as entities in a market economy, with various products to sell, customers to lure and governments to lobby for favours. The result is an iconoclastic, scholarly, detailed and wide-ranging treatise that apparently rebuts the arguments of other academics who have objected to this viewpoint. I was not familiar with most of the writing in this field, and found his take on religions as commodities competing in a market economy convincing, perhaps because of my ignorance of the counterarguments.

The writing is humourless, arid, and poorly organized but the scope of the author’s knowledge is encyclopedic, with examples ranging from the split of Buddhism from Hinduism to the competition between evangelical South Korean megachurches and Buddhist leaders. The most effective and appropriate roles of politics in regulating the market for religion is extensively discussed. The discussion of religious terrorism in economic terms is insightful- he suggests that we should be buying the fanatics off, rather than shooting or jailing them!

The analogy of the Catholic Church to a franchise business selling salvation and decreased time in purgatory is very apt. The invention of purgatory in the 12th century itself was a brilliant innovation that facilitated modern capitalism by allowing moneylenders to ply their trade at the cost of buying indulgences, as a business expense. Salvation became monetized. In another sphere, one of the ‘products’ sold in Buddhism is the promise of reincarnation as a higher form of life.

The niche markets in religion include those that cater to disadvantaged and sometimes persecuted sectors of society, such as those that have sprung up to serve the LGBT communities. Brekke identifies women as one such niche and suggests that there may be a big market for a new religion in which God is a woman. He documents the mimicry of religions by atheist and humanist organizations that compete in the market for rites, including confirmations, weddings and funerals. Should atheism and secular humanism be considered as religions?

Chapter 14 on reification discusses the inherent fuzziness of the boundaries of what should be considered a religion at all and what national governments should allow to be considered a religion with the monetary benefits, rights, respect and societal recognition religions frequently enjoy. I think this should have been Chapter 1. And my favourite church, the Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, recognized as a legitimate religion in New Zealand, but not in the United States, is never mentioned.

This book would make a great text for university courses in comparative religion, but is heavy going for the average Western reader like me.

This somewhat dated autobiography is really two books meshed into one. The first is a detailed account of Oliver’s encounters with and assessment of many public figures, mostly prominent world politicians as seen by an unapologetic news hound, as the subtitle suggests. The second is an adventure documentary of the life of a risk-loving outdoorsman who enjoyed the challenges of reporting from the front lines of wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Middle East and long wilderness treks to shoot dangerous rapids in rivers of the far north in a canoe, often accompanied by well-known Canadian politicians, most notably Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

After a troubled childhood in Prince Rupert, shuffled between homes by alcoholic parents, Craig Oliver landed a job as a part time radio announcer there, then worked his way up to become a full time reporter for CBC. After a falling out with the bloated CBC bureaucracy, he switched to CTV, and became their chief parliamentary correspondent, a job he still performs.

The hard-drinking, lax sexual mores, and cutthroat culture of male-dominant national journalism (and many politicians, though by no means all) is portrayed in detail without apologies. There is a liberal bias to Oliver’s outlook, which he recognizes and acknowledges, but his assessment of the personalities of all the politicos he rubbed shoulders with, from John Diefenbaker to Ronald Reagan to Stephen Harper, seems balanced and fair for the most part.

It seems a pity that this book was written in 2011, and thus does not include any insights into the inner workings of our current crop of politicians. But that is understandable, given that Oliver is now 80, and has been legally blind for several years.

The writing is sparse with no wasted words and there are abundant humorous anecdotes. Jason Kenny is quoted as saying of Stephen Harper’s autocratic style of governing “The communications director for the prime minister does not believe in communicating.”

For anyone interested in the inside story of Canadian history over those 50+ years covered here, this book will be a great companion to the duller standard texts.

I walk every day for a least an hour in all kinds of weather, always varying my route, so I thought this book might be interesting. Of necessity as my French is limited to some common words and phrases, I read the English translation. In France, this book has apparently been on some best-seller list. I am not sure when the French original was published.

Detailing the musings of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Rousseau, and Thoreau with eloquently expressed but ethereal generalities about the virtues of walking, I found the first half of the book quite pedantic, bordering on boring. These famous walkers would all now be considered extreme eccentrics if not insane. And for some periods of their lives they did nothing but walk daily, every day, and all day. I have never considered walking as a goal in itself, but as a means of getting somewhere, enjoying nature, enjoying an interesting conversation with other walkers or a easy way to avoid distractions and simply think. The chapter on Emanuel Kant’s very regimented daily walks contains his great quote: “It is during that continuous but automatic effort of the body, that the mind is placed at one’s disposal.”

The second half of this book comes alive in places starting with the Pilgrimage chapter. Detailing the symbolism of sacrifice, spiritual development, repentance, atonement, and forgiveness of the pilgrimages of Christians to various holy sites, the history of these pilgrimages is interesting. Perhaps the most famous nomadic walker of all time was Jesus of Nazareth, with his most famous walk being from Herod’s palace to Golgotha. There is, however, no mention of another famous pilgrimage, that obligatory walk for all devout fit Moslems to Mecca, modelled after the journeys of the Prophet, nor that of pious Hindus to the upper Ganges for purification. For nonreligious walkers, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, a modern novel by Rachael Joyce provides a secular version of pilgrimage, full of similar symbolism and more mystique without the overtly religious connotations, and is a delight to read.

The chapter on the ancient cynics is just as confusing, rambling and incoherent as their rants were. The description of Mahatma Gandhi’s protest walks on behalf of Indian farmers in South Africa and his famous salt tax march to the sea in India provides an historical perspective to the modern era’s proliferation of protest marches as political statements. But there is no mention of long walks associated with evil or ambiguous outcomes, such as Mao’s long march.

One striking feature of this book; all of the famous walkers were men, and all of the pronouns are male. Were there no significant female walkers in history? In my walking group at our complex there are 15 women and two men.

Overall, I have mixed feeling about this little book. There are some great aphorisms, and some interesting history lessons from the great walkers of the past, but rather than reading it, I think I might have benefitted more by going for a long walk.

Readers who enjoy murder mysteries with more suspects than one can keep track of, and with surprises in the last chapter, all love Louise Penny’s novels all featuring Chief Inspector Gamache, and all set in Quebec. My wife has read and enjoyed all of her books, and thinks that although they are rather formulaic with the same characters showing up in several stories, each can stand alone. This is the first and only one I have read, and I did so only because it is on for discussion in my book club. The characters all seemed like exaggerated caricatures to me and there are all of the usual requisite lies and false leads- and the apparently upstanding closet gays and derelicts who are not who they seem to be. I will not give away any of the plot with it’s byzantine twists. At least, unlike many of this genre, nothing was predicable far in advance.

There are at least two blatant errors that a copy-editor or the author should have picked up. First, there is the oft-repeated assertion that opioid use causes dilation of pupils. Any pharmacology or medical student knows that they universally cause pupillary constriction. And one character is said to have died by being run over by a combine being used for harvesting hay. As any eight-year old farm kid knows, a combine is used for harvesting grains, not hay.

I have no issue with the use of very foul language in novels, when it is from the mouth of a character who would be expected to use such language. But it seems far less appropriate when the author uses it in the narrative, as occasionally happens here as it seems to indicate a paucity of vocabulary when you cannot think of an alternative adjective that would be appropriate in polite company. That alone ruined several of John Irving’s novels for me.

I did not really enjoy this book, but I can understand why some readers will. Tastes differ.

This inappropriately titled, extensively researched new biography of the one-legged Virginia Hall documents her extraordinary feats of bravery and determination as an undercover agent in the French Resistance during World War 2, as an agent of Churchill’s Special Operations Executive and the American Office of Strategic Services. Seemingly addicted to risky endeavours, she worked after the war as an agent of the of Central Intelligence Agency after having done more than any other woman in history to ensure an Allied victory in France. Working in a world dominated by male chauvinists, she never received the recognition that she clearly deserved. Even the awarding to her of the French Legion of Honour, the British Order of the British Empire and the American Distinguished Service Cross were low-key unpublicized events, soon forgotten.

Many of her accomplishments were made possible by refusing to be squeamish about such techniques as using a madam and her girls to deliberately extract information from Nazi soldiers, and to ensure they got syphilis or gonorrhoea, and to get them addicted to heroin. Her own drive to ensure an Allied victory was powered by extensive use of Benzedrine.

For those of us who are geographically challenged Purnell provided a very helpful map of the relevant areas of France. There is also a useful list of some of the various operatives with their aliases and code names. Even so, I had some difficulty in keeping all the people and names straight.

The intrigue and double-crossing of the undercover world is on vivid display- her work was compromised by a mercenary double agent posing as a devout Catholic priest who passed her plans and secrets on to the Nazis. After documenting the savagery of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi ‘butcher of Lyon’ she was dismayed by the CIA’s insistence on providing him with protection and escape to Bolivia after the war. She apparently had no qualms about providing tons of money on behalf of the CIA to influence the outcome of the 1948 Italian election- foreign powers trying to influence sovereign state’s elections is obviously not a new phenomenon.

As must be true of any biography written long after the death of the subject, some speculation is required in attributing motives and emotions, but these all seem to be cohesive and in keeping with the known characteristics of the subject here.

The geographic details and the real horrors of wartime France documented here reminded me of the fictionalized account of similar circumstances in Kristen Hannah’s The Nightingale.

This is a very educational and engaging documentation of a unsung hero that deserves more recognition than she ever got in her lifetime, although she apparently humbly at one point referred to herself as a woman of no importance.

Michelle Dextras suggested this Irish author’s books in response to one of my reviews, and I appreciate such suggestions. Toibin is the author of seven novels, some poetry, and some journalism. In deciding which of his books to start with, I rejected the newest, House of Names, as it was described as akin to science fiction, which I usually do not enjoy. Perhaps I should try to expand my choices, but why would I do that in my dotage?

First, my only negative comment. There are no Acknowledgements in this book. Did no one provide any help with its writing and publication, or was this just an oversight?

This story centres on a youngish Irish widow with four children living in the author’s hometown of Enniscorthy, in Wexford county, south of Dublin, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Much of the story must be based on recollections of his childhood there, including the experiences of a stuttering boy in a boarding school and being fatherless from age ten. This was at the time when ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland were just beginning. The protests and killings in Northern Ireland and the retaliation in the south are described accurately. Some of the characters are Fianna Fáil sympathizers rooting for the violent IRA; others belong to the liberal Fine Gael party; Toibin reveals no bias in his political treatment, although some of his relatives were members of the IRA.

This story does not rely on the plot to hold the reader’s interest, but on the character development and the masterful use of the language. Where a lesser writer would have inserted a dramatic twist such as finding the dead body of the rebellious teenage daughter who has gone missing for three days during Dublin riots, Toibin has her show up unharmed with a plausible simple explanation. There are no sudden surprises, and, refreshingly, no sex or foul language whatsoever, and no gratuitous violence.

Anyone from or having lived in the south of Ireland will love the detailed lyrical description of the landscape and local culture, and classical music aficionados will love the symbolism and metaphors of the efforts of singers and the different emotions and sensations evoked by different works and interpretations. And anyone who grew up in the late sixties or earlier, even if not Irish, will enjoy recalling the primitive means of communication and navigation in an era with limited black- and-white TV, unreliable public phone booths, manually entered business ledgers, and no internet, cell phones, email, texting or GPS.

As the story develops, the mourning, sensitive, insecure widow and some of her relatives seem to be unable to carry on a normal conversation without taking umbrage at what someone said, finding insults where none were intended, and becoming quite paranoid. But the introspection and self-analysis common in novels emphasizing characters rather than plot is not overdone here. Nora only very gradually develops striking assertiveness and finds the inner strength to fight for justice for her family and her own rights. Only at the very end of the book, three years after his death, when she finally removes her husband’s clothing from the wardrobe, and burns his love letters that she has saved, does she finally overcome her grief, and even then we are left with doubts about her future.

An uplifting sensitive story that I quite enjoyed. I may try his Blackwater Lightship sometime soon although I rarely read more than one book by the same author. Thanks, Michelle.

I checked this book out of the library because I have long had an interest in the interface of neuroscience, philosophy, ethics, and daily decision-making, and it seemed to be relevant.

The founder of the Lab of Misfits, Beau Lotto is a British/American neuroscientist whose research mostly relates to how humans perceive their external world through their five senses. After struggling through this difficult work, I am not sure if he is a genius who is so smart that I can’t possibly understand him or an arrogant elitist who tries hard to impress us lesser beings by using endless disconnected narratives, analogies and linguistic jargon. With either possibility, he failed to impress me. With chapter titles such as “Information is Meaningless”, “The Illusion of Illusions”, “Changing The Future Past”, and “Celebrate Doubt”, it seems the one constant in his message is that we can’t really know anything and everything we think we know is a delusion. Only he and his misfits apparently have the insight to understand this, although he attempts to convince the rest of us that this is true- and fails. And it seems peculiar that this professor who specializes in sensory perceptions and misfits does not even mention synesthesia, the not-rare varied phenomenon of crossed wiring of sensory inputs resulting in people smelling colours, seeing sounds or tasting names. It strikes me that someone with this syndrome (many do not recognize that they are uniquely wired neurologically) would make for a great central figure in a work of fiction. Does anyone know of such a novel?

Abundant use of silly and annoying switching of fonts, spacing, capitals, italics and bold type in the both text and insets, obscure visual tricks, and meaningless line diagrams may make the message seem erudite and profound to some readers, but not this one. A quote, “At bottom, our lives are in fact nothing more than millions and millions of sequential knee-jerk reflexive responses.” would seem to deny the possibility of us exerting any free will- or of us following his later advice to modify our lives by questioning our every assumption. He never really addresses the conundrum of free will.

What does such gobbledegook as “Understanding reduces the complexity of data by collapsing the dimensionality of information to a lower set of known variables.” mean for those of us whose language skills are average? And there are literally hundreds of such obscure sentences in this book.

Unless you are in need of a humbling education by someone who purports to have insights that you could not possibly understand, I cannot recommend this book. But did I learn anything? Yes- be a bit more cautious when deciding to check a book out of the library, and to ignore the Advanced Praise blurbs of people whose names I do not recognize.

I can envision many henpecked husbands buying this novel just by considering the pleasure suggested by the title. But, like someone releasing a sulphurous colonic emission into a crowded elevator, hoping to never be identified as the source, this wife is secretive-and deadly. But the title is misleading- the wife of note is only selectively silent. Perhaps the author had sales potential in mind when deciding on the title-creative writing gurus always insist that the title should be the last decision made for almost any book.

This is the first and, unfortunately, the only novel by the late Toronto-based author, as she died shortly after it was published. The complicated story is based on the lives of seemingly ordinary people in modern Chicago, although almost all of them are deeply flawed. They are a varied lot, including a waitress in a sleazy restaurant/bar, a entrepreneurial home renovator given to bouts of depressiony with an enormous, indiscriminate libido, his equally lecherous widowed boyhood friend turned salesman with a very immature daughter, who is a social sciences university student, and a psychotherapist. Given the demographics of Chicago, it is perhaps an oversight, but a forgivable one, that there are no blacks and no hispanics even mentioned.

Some of the introspective self-analysis that some characters engage in borders on psychobabble, but there are also keen insights into basic human frailties. In one sense it is a classic love triangle romance, but one side of the triangle becomes a modern day Lady MacBeth with the benefit of training in Adlerian psychotherapy. The ending is far from predicable, with an ingenious twist and a touch of ambiguity. At about page 200, I guessed at a possible ending but was completely wrong.

Having spent a few days in Chicago every year for over twenty years, I have fond memories of several of the iconic landmarks that are featured, most notably the bar at the Drake Hotel, where I spent several evenings with great friends that I only saw once a year.

The writing is engaging and straightforward. For most of the book, the short chapters alternate between “Her” and “Him” narrated by a third person observer, until in Part 2, there no longer is a “Him”.

A very enjoyable light read.